So It’s Weird, Now Deal With It | Time-Tested Stoic Truths For Life

It’s weird. It’s unnatural. It’s not how you’d like things to be. But so what? Welcome to life. ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  So it's weird. Now, deal with it. It must have been quite a shock for him, the introverted boy, the lover of books, the philosopher, suddenly finding himself the emperor of Rome. He's famous, he's powerful, he's loved, he's hated, he's besieged with requests. How did Marcus Aurelius handle it? "Living on a lighted stage approaches the unreal," the band Rush sings in their classic song "Limelight," "for those who think and feel." Some are attracted to that limelight, crave the attention, feel at home in it. That was not who Marcus was. It would have been surreal, unnatural, like a cage for him. But you know what he did?

• 1:11Ryan Holiday?

  He did what a Stoic does, what we all have to do in life. He adjusted, he figured it out. He found solace and strength in his own soul. He found practices that helped him. Clearly, journaling was one of those. He got advice. And as it happens, you can read all about what Antoninus, his predecessor, told him at the beginning of meditation. As it happens, you can read in meditations everything that his predecessor, Antoninus, told him about this crazy job. He got on with doing the job that was assigned to him. That's what Rush figured out, too, as they wrestled with their own fame. As they say in the song, "Those who wish to be must put aside the alienation,

• 1:53Ryan Holiday?

  get on with the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme." It's weird, it's unnatural, it's not how things you would like to be, but so what? Welcome to life. Welcome to all different types of things in life, not just fame. You gotta figure out what you like about it. You gotta figure out what's interesting about it, what's possible with it. And then, you gotta get to work. That's the job.

• 2:26Ryan Holiday?

  The internet is flooded with advice. You don't know who these people are. You don't know if they know what they're talking about. What proof do they have that this advice is true? Has staying powered? That it's worked out well for the person giving it to you? The thing about Stoicism is that it's about as tried and tested as advice could be. Stoicism was ancient to many of the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher king, when he is drawing on Stoic philosophy to base his life around, it's already a philosophy that's hundreds of years old. Thousands of people, over thousands of years, have tested this advice, these ideas over and over and over again.

• 3:10Ryan Holiday?

  So these aren't hacks, these aren't shortcuts, these aren't piddly little things. These are things that have been through the crucible, that have been tested in some of the hardest and most difficult situations human beings have ever been through. And that's what we're going to go after in today's episode. Some short but essential lessons from the ancient Stoics that have been put to the test, that have been refined down. We have the essence of the wisdom of some of the smartest people who ever lived, tried and tested through the centuries. Here are some of the best pieces of Stoic wisdom you can apply to your actual life.

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  Does this actually matter? So many of the things we're upset about, that we hold on to, that we focus on, they don't matter, not to you, to anyone at all. They just don't matter. Marcus Aurelius says, "Ask yourself in every moment, is this essential?" This is because most of what we do and say is not essential. He says, "When you eliminate the inessential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better." Stephen Colbert loses his father and several siblings in a plane crash as a young man. And he said what he took out of this was a question from his mother. She said, "Can you look at this in the light of eternity? Does this matter in the big picture?" Right? Because so many of the things we trivially get upset about, that we focus on,

• 4:28Ryan Holiday?

  in moments of crisis, we get real clarity about and we realize they didn't matter at all. People matter. Your loved ones matter. Doing your best matters. Everything else is irrelevant. And yet, that's where we focus so much of our time and energy.

• 4:47Ryan Holiday?

  Well begun is half done, as they say. So own the morning. If you want to have a good day, have a good morning. If you want to have a good life, have a good day. So it all comes back to how you start the day. Own the morning. It's a great passage of Marcus Aurelius where he's arguing with himself about getting up out of bed in the morning. And he says, look, were you meant to huddle under the covers and stay warm? He says, no, get to work. Do what you gotta do. Do what you were put here on this earth to do and do it early.

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  The thing is not the problem. It's your opinion about that thing. The Stoics say the event is objective. It's indifferent to us. It's our opinions about it that are the problem. By the way, the thing is not asking for your opinion. It doesn't give a shit about your opinion.

• 5:33Ryan Holiday?

  You have to say no a lot. This goes back to Marcus Aurelius. Is this essential? If it's not essential, what do you do? This is the rule. You say no. You have to say no. When I talk to NFL teams, this is something we talk about. I say, look, everything you say yes to means you're saying no to something else. And whatever you say no to gives you more room, more time to say yes to what matters. In their case, being great at what they do. So what are you going to say no to this year? So you can say yes to the things that matter, to the people that matter in your life as well.

• 6:08Ryan Holiday?

  You don't get rich acquiring things, acquiring money. Epictetus says it's not about having many things. It's about having few wants. If you have everything you need, if you have enough, if you feel sufficient, then you are very rich. Would it also be nice to pair that with having a lot of money? Sure. But you could also have very little and feel like enough, feel good. Get to a place where you feel like you have enough and you are rich. When you pare your wants down, when you don't need anything from anyone or anything outside your control, that to the Stoics is true wealth.

• 6:42Ryan Holiday?

  Is this in my control? Epictetus says this is the key question. This is the chief task of the philosopher in life, which is separating the things that are up to us and the things that are not up to us. And so much of the time and energy we spend in this life are on things that are not up to us, that are not in our control. It just started raining. I don't need to have an opinion on the fact that it's raining because it's not in my control. But what is in my control is what I'm going to do, right? What's in our control is our actions, our thoughts, our opinions, right? And so the Stoic learns to tune out what's not in our control, and it focuses on what is in our control. And so we ask ourselves about everything we experience, everything we're feeling, everything we're working on. Is this up to me?

• 7:26Ryan Holiday?

  Or am I throwing good energy after bad? Am I beating myself against the wall? It's never going to move.

• 7:35Ryan Holiday?

  You have to remember you're a product of your habits. Epictetus says, "If you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices. If you want to be excellent, make excellent choices. Make them habitually. Day in and day out, they add up."

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  You've got to stop wasting time talking about this stuff, arguing what a good person is like, what the right thing is, these complicated virtue ethics. Marcus really says, "Waste no more time arguing what a good person is like. Just be one."

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca says, "We're all slaves to something." He points out a powerful Roman who was a slave to his mistress. He talks about a Roman politician who's a slave to his ambition, to the crowd, right? Maybe you're a slave to money, or food, or wine. He says, "Even slave owners were slaves to their estates." So we're all slaves to something. He says, "We should look very suspiciously at any habit, or practice, or item that has power over us." We cannot go without that controls what we do and say and think and where we go.

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  It's called self-discipline for a reason. It's not something you wield against other people. In Meditations, Marcus really says, "Remember, tolerant with others, strict with yourself." They're your standards. They're your goals. They're your beliefs. You can hold yourself to them, but not other people.

• 9:02Ryan Holiday?

  Another way to spell perfectionism Churchill said was paralysis. They are the same thing. You think it's that you have high standards, but it's actually an excuse not to have to do things.

• 9:15Ryan Holiday?

  Outcomes are not in our control. Process and effort is. So the Stoics say focus on effort, not outcomes. Ignore the results. Focus on what's in front of you. I have to do this with my books. I want to write the best book possible. I want to try as hard as I can on the marketing. I want to do the absolute best I can. Everything after that is extra. It's not up to me. Success is internal. Did I do what I set out to do? Everything else is irrelevant.

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  You're not being harmed. You're not being screwed over. You're not being challenged. You're being, Epictetus said, paired with a strong sparring partner. Life is helping you. Life is making you better. Life is teaching you. Life is making you stronger. You want to wrestle with this. You pick hard sparring partners. Pick people who you get better for wrestling with.

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

  Are you meditating on your mortality? I carry a coin in my pocket that says memento mori. You can leave life right now, Marcus really says. Life is short. Don't waste time. Don't focus on things that don't matter. Going through our life with a clear sense of our mortality is essential.

• 10:32Ryan Holiday?

  What am I missing by choosing to worry or be afraid? One of my favorite books is The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker. And he says, when you worry, ask yourself, what am I choosing not to see right now? Right? We only have so much in the way of cognitive resources or time or emotional energy. How are you going to spend it? And then often by being anxious, by being worried, by taking things personally, by being afraid, we're taking our eye off the ball. And so I want you to see those emotions not just as unpleasant, but actively destructive, because they are. Stuff's going to happen in life that makes us emotional, but we have to realize that we're only compounding that by acting on those emotions.

• 11:17Ryan Holiday?

  You have two choices, Seneca says. You can laugh or cry. Democritus, one of the philosophers, he cried. He despaired at how awful and evil the world was. Seneca pointed out Heracitus, he laughed at it. We think of the Stoics as humorless, but they weren't. Instead of despairing, instead of being angry, instead of being depressed, instead of any of those negative emotions, they decided to laugh at the absurdity of life. They decided to laugh at the pain that life can inflict on us because it's the one part of it we control. We control our response to it, so we might as well find humor in it instead of pain and suffering and anger.

• 11:53Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca says we suffer more in imagination than reality, and that gives us the next law, which is don't suffer imagined troubles. The stuff that you're worried about, it'll happen or it won't. Worrying doesn't affect it, right? So Seneca says, don't feel more than you have to. Deal with that when it comes. For now, focus on what's in front of you. Focus on what you need to do. Don't add to your suffering by anticipating it, by suffering in advance. That's only adding cumulatively up to more suffering.